Another way to put your knowledge
and experience to good use is by mentoring others. Reading this Letter suggests you have already successfully
navigated a number of challenging
processes. At some point you have become interested in computer science
and started taking steps to build a career in the field. You may have become
a member of an ACM student chapter
or found your way to grad school, and
are receiving XRDS because you are a
student member of ACM. Many other
students want to achieve such things
as well, and your insight could be very
valuable to them.

As an example of both writingand mentoring, when I was consider-ing applying to U.S. Ph.D. programswhile doing my master’s in the Neth-erlands, I looked for informationabout the application process. Everyuniversity has information on itswebsite on the requirements for ap-plying, but many aspects of a success-ful application that are expected to becommon knowledge were unknownto me. For example, I had no ideaabout the relative importance of thedifferent components of an applica-tion. Should I spend more time tryingto ace the GREs (a standardized testfor U.S. grad-school applications) ormore time doing research with a pro-fessor? Should I worry if my GRE “ver-bal reasoning” score is not in the 90thpercentile or is okay for non-nativespeakers? How many schools should IPage limits and the expertise of theintended audience of research paperscan result in dense articles filled withformal results but lacking intuition. Ablog post can focus on building intu-ition for tools or algorithms so otherpeople are able to apply them to theirown problems. You can also use a blogto write about general trends and in-sights that are not novel enough tocover in a formal research paper orcomprehensive enough to warrant asurvey paper. One example that comesto mind is Andrej Karpathy’s excel-lent blog post “The UnreasonableEffectiveness of Recurrent NeuralNetworks,”
2 where he gives an over-view of RNNs and shows in a very ef-fective visual way how some neuronslearn patterns we humans recognizeimmediately. Even if you are not atthe stage where you are doing origi-nal research, maintaining a technicalblog may be a great way to summarizewhat you are learning and giving backto the community. Like me, you haveprobably used quite a few tutorialswhen you first learned to write code,typically written by members of thecommunity, like yourself.

Writing about things you are
learning or researching is great for
two reasons. On the one hand, it is
relatively easy for authors, as they
typically have thought about the
subject for some time before starting to write. In a sense it is a way to
chronicle for yourself what you have
done, while at the same time giving
valuable insight to others to make
their learning process easier. On
the other hand, it also forces you to
think about the subject at a different
level of abstraction from what you
may be used to, thus expanding your
understanding. Even for these “
Letters from the Editors” in XRDS, after
Jennifer Jacobs and I decide what to
write about, we spend at least a couple of hours researching the topic
to make sure we remember things
correctly. This process corrects mistakes that exist in your mental model and repetition helps you master
the material that much more.

2
https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-ef-
fectiveness/

cision. To answer I spoke to several
professors at the schools that admitted me, and eventually I served as
a student member on the Stanford
computer science Ph.D. admissions
committee. That satisfied my own curiosity about the topic, but I wanted to
make sure that students who were in
a similar situation could save themselves at least some of the trouble I
had gone through.

I wrote a document called “Doing a
(Computer Science) Ph.D. in the United States (as a Dutchman)”
3 and gave
talks in the Netherlands on the subject. Doing this has put me in touch
with a number of students who I then
mentored through their applications.
This does not take much time (all the
students were highly motivated and
independent to begin with), but it is
useful for them to have a sounding
board while going through the process. To this day, I receive email messages every now and then from people
who have discovered the document
and found it useful. I spent a lot of effort figuring out the application process. By comparison, writing down
everything was easy, and getting to
know all these motivated and excited
students has been a great pleasure.
Seeing them be accepted at places
like Johns Hopkins, Duke, and Stanford has been truly rewarding.

One common theme in (
non-technical) writing and mentoring is
you are providing a valuable service
to others. This is worthwhile on its
own but is not to say that others are
the only ones who benefit. Learning
is fun, but passing on the knowledge
and using it beyond what is helpful
for yourself can be a great way to gain
a greater sense of purpose in your
work. Moreover, any effort to popularize insight from your research will
make the research more accessible
to others, meaning they are more
likely to use it themselves. Just as
knowledge valorization generates extra value from scientific knowledge,
blogging and mentoring can generate extra value from your research,
studies, and experience.

3 Available on my website;
http://www.okke.info.

— Okke Schrijvers

Another wayto putyour knowledgeand experienceto good useis by mentoringothers.